Dictee

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

• Title

  Dictee

• Date 2022 [1982]
• ISBN 9780520390485
• Publisher Oakland, CA: University of California Press
• Description 178 p.; 8 in.; b/w ill.
• Language English, Korean, French
• Collections Permanent Collection
• Summary

  Dictee is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty (War on Books). 

• Tags Experimental poetry, Korean literature, Art